Edison officials overseeing the plant’s decommissioning have set a target date of the end of 2032 to remove nearly every remnant of the generating station, which hugs the Southern California coastline at the northern tip of San Diego County in Camp Pendleton.

The operative word is "nearly" because, in all likelihood, the waste — also called spent fuel or used fuel — will stay behind for years to come, stranded until a long-term solution is reached on what to do with it.

Going back to the 1960s when the plant broke ground, anti-nuclear critics and Edison officials have not often seen eye-to-eye. But when it comes to the spent fuel, they are in complete agreement: Both sides want it off the premises as soon as possible.

"This is not the right solution, putting the waste on the beach," said Ray Lutz, El Cajon resident and founder of the nonprofit Citizens Oversight. Lutz made the comment on June 22, just before a Community Engagement Panel, one of a series of public meetings Edison hosts every three months.

"It’s very frustrating," Tom Palmisano, Edison’s vice president of decommissioning and the chief nuclear officer, said earlier this month.

Although the used fuel at San Onofre is Edison’s responsibility, it's ultimately supposed to be handed over to the federal government and the U.S. Department of Energy, as per the details of the 1982 Waste Policy Act passed by Congress.

But a repository for waste from nuclear sites across the country including San Onofre does not exist.

"Frankly, it should have been solved by now but it hasn't been," said John Kotek, acting assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy.

"We're trying to develop a durable solution to this problem," Kotek told the packed house at the June 22 meeting in San Juan Capistrano.

Million-year plan confounds feds

For decades, a site was proposed at Yucca Mountain in Nevada that was originally required to protect the environment from the release of radioactive isotopes for 10,000 years.

But Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, a longtime opponent of storing nuclear waste in his home state, became the Senate Majority Leader after the 2006 elections. During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama said Yucca Mountain was "an expensive failure and should be abandoned."

Yucca Mountain effectively is off the table.

"Right now, we have a broken system," said Macfarlane, who also spoke at the Community Engagement Panel and served on a federal blue-ribbon commission looking into the nuclear waste issue.

Kotek and the Department of Energy are developing what they're calling an integrated waste management system to find interim storage sites, where waste from places such as San Onofre could be sent.

As one would expect, finding places to accept nuclear waste is difficult, but DOE is actively looking for communities willing to step forward in what the agency calls a "consent-based siting process."

"We think that it will take us on the order of eight years to get a facility in place, a transportation system in place to be able to move material," Kotek told the Union-Tribune.

"Then there's a whole legal question of the order in which we can receive material and that all still needs to be worked out,” he said. “So it's very difficult at this point in time to put a precise date on it, but we think in terms of developing the capacity to take materials, that's something we should be able to do in less than 10 years."

Macfarlane said Congress also must get involved. "They need to fix the current, broken system," she said.

"That site will not survive for 10,000 years, just based on the normal erosion and other factors," Issa said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

"So we know we're going to move it (from San Onofre),” he said. “Why not move it once to a site where it can remain for that period of time, at least with current technology?"

But getting other members on Capitol Hill to tackle an issue that can be politically, well, radioactive, is another story.

"For most in Congress, their political horizon is two years, four years, six years out," McFarlane said. "They're not motivated."

And the November 2016 election is fast approaching.

"Honestly, I think we need to get through the election year and see what we can do," Palmisano said last month.

Issa said he's holding out hope that something can be passed this year, even if it's through a continuing resolution or other legislative maneuvers. "There are a number of ways both the House and the Senate often agree to things at the very end of a Congress," he said.

Then there are other decisions to make: Even if a site is found, which waste from which site should go first?

Should facilities that have been waiting the longest amount of time get their waste moved first? Or should priority go to those with the largest amounts of waste, or have the largest concentrations of people surrounding the nuclear facilities?

Some critics say the canisters, designed by Holtec International, are susceptible to cracking. Others say San Onofre is vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis or terror attacks, but Edison officials insist the canisters and the site are safe.

If there was a place to ship the fuel today, it would still take time to get the waste ready to move.

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Palmisano said of the estimated 125 canisters of spent fuel — including the 73 canisters in the process of moving from wet to dry storage — all but 17 are expected to be eligible for shipping by 2020. Fifteen canisters, in fact, are available to ship now.

The oldest fuel is packed in 17 canisters from the Unit 1 reactor that hasn't been in operation since 1992.

But Palmisano said some of those canisters cannot be shipped out until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest because the fuel rods were encased in stainless steel, the technology of the time. That fuel needs to decay for 38 years before transportation.

How hard would it be to physically move the SONGS waste?

Jack Edlow, the president of Edlow International, a company headquartered in Washington D.C. with an office in St. Petersburg, Russia that specializes in moving radioactive waste, expressed no doubts to the Community Engagement Panel.

"I can move that stuff. It's not that difficult," said Edlow, who said his company has experience shipping spent fuel around the world via truck, rail, ocean and even, in emergency situations, by air.

"It can be done economically and safely," Edlow said. "This is not a hard one."

Edlow said he typically can draw up a plan in about six months. "We just need to know where to take it."

But finding that place — or places — will take years, and demand a level of political and bureaucratic coordination that poses challenges in the short-term and the long-term.

"Interim is an interesting word because nobody really believes that 'interim' is a short period of time," Issa said. "But rather, we need it for 10,000 years, and I don't know how long before we find something we call 'permanent.' "

Kotek said he understands the frustration among people living in the San Onofre area.

"It was a commitment made by the federal government decades ago that we would provide for ultimate disposal capability," Kotek told the Union-Tribune. "It hasn't happened yet. It falls to me and my team right now under the leadership of the Secretary of Energy to try to and make that happen."

But Macfarlane, the former NRC chair, said DOE alone can't make a decision that would involve all the details necessary to make moving nuclear waste a reality.

"The only way to get at a solution is for you guys to pressure Congress to solve this problem," Macfarlane told the crowd that packed into the San Juan Capistrano Community Center. "And that's a heavy lift. But right now I think that's the only way forward, really."